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Sleeve Notes

Inlay: Outer

GRACE JONES

SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM

GRACE JONES

SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM

a biography

Produced by TREVOR HORN

Assisted by S.J. Lipson

engineering and synclaviar programming: Lipson

(The synclaviar was used extensively during the compilation of this biography: acknowledgement to New England Digital)

Against the snow an Incarnation of Beauty of tall stature. Whistlings of death and rounds of muffled music make this adored body rise, swell and tremble like a ghost: wounds, scarlet and black, erupt in this superb flesh. The colours natural to life deepen, dance and disengage themselves around the Vision in the making. And shudders rise and roar, and the frenzied favour of these effects becoming laden with the mortal whistlings and the harsh music which the world, far behind us, flings at our mother of beauty—she recoils, she draws herself up. Oh! our bones are invested with an amorous new body.

Rhythm is both the song’s manacle and its demonic charge. It is the original breath, it is the whisper of unremitting demand. What do you still want of me? says the singer. What do you think you can still draw from my lips?

“Exact presence that no fantasy can represent; purveyor of the oldest secret; alive with the blood that boils again and is pulsing where the rhythm is torn apart. How your singer’s blood is incensed at the depth of sound.”

Lacerations echo in the mouth’s open erotic sky—where dance together the lost frenzies of rhythm and an imploring im/mobility. The voice is slow, heavy, like the voice of a woman awakening from a time of betrayal. A voice like the slow rising, the slow opening of the dark. (…the impression is of moving in the shadows of syllables.)

Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time … enslaved to its rhythms. The singer’s body finds its release in such confinement.

A voice of non-participation: not so much a song for any ‘you’ as the ruthless solicitation of disappointment, of disappointment’s immense pleasures … a maniacally glacial position taken up on the outermost limits of expectation. A perfect dissinulation: unabridged violence of the voice affirming a subjugated state.Annihilating rhythm.

Q And what happened?

I assumed an expression as clownish and wild as possible; I became a fabulous opera; I saw that everyone has a destined end to happiness; action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. La morale est la faiblesse de la cervelle.

Q And what is happening?

Charm, science and patience. The most amazing atmospheric accidents. Delights!

Q And what will happen when you’re 75?

…I’ll still be putting on my make up.

…or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

I was amazed when I first saw Grace Jones. I could see how the average guy who was used to pretty girls could get scared by her physical appearance. It was so powerful. I photographed her in different positions. I cut her legs apart, lengthened them, turned her body to face the audience. Then I started painting, joining up the pieces to give the illusion that Grace Jones actually posed for the photographs. The pose was anatomically impossible. I had the idea of using Grace as the ideal vehicle for my work. She had inspired me. In an unexpected way Grace had come to obsess me.

extract from JUNGLE FEVER—Jean Paul Goude

“what heart shall I shatter.”

…THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘live’ as thoughtless reiteration of recorded moments and a wildly interpretative revision completely sold on the nature of performing, flaunting the luxury of being looked at. The Grace Jones show is just so showy I won’t convince you of the half of it. It rouses a multiplicity of hints and whispers contained under the sheets of smooth surface texture, embedded in her recorded self. It surprises and the prise is prize. It exposes and the pose is prose. It disgraces and the Grace is…

…preparing for perfection.

Front cover picture by Jean Paul Goude, Sleeve edited and designed by XLztt

Text: extracts from I. Penman’s ‘The Annihilation Of Rhythm’—read on the record by Ian McShane

Interviews with the rhythm conducted seriously by Paul Morley and jovially by Paul Cooke (acknowledgement to Capital Radio)

Back cover picture by Anton Corbijn: Iceland 1982

The strictly unreasonable ZTTBBC were conducted and directed by Richard Niles Grace Jones appears by permission of Manhattan Records, a division of Capitol Records Inc.